ICSOC '21 Demo Paper #273 Reviews and Comments

Paper #273 Seamless Synchronization for Collaborative Web Services

Submitted: 27 August 2021
Accepted: 1 October 2021

Review 1: 2 (accept)
Review 2: 0 (borderline paper)
Review 3: 1 (weak accept)

Overall evaluation

2 (accept)

Reviewer's confidence

3 (medium)

Strenghts

1. This paper proposes a generic web middleware for data synchronization in browserbased applications and interactive groupware.
2. It offers a fine-grained data synchronization model.
3. It provides an interactive demonstration of a public drawing application that workshop attendees can test and experiment with.

Weaknesses

1. The reference should be improved.
2. The contribution is not enough. Please list more contribution.

Overall evaluation

1. This paper proposes a generic web middleware for data synchronization in browserbased applications and interactive groupware.
2. It offers a fine-grained data synchronization model.
3. It provides an interactive demonstration of a public drawing application that workshop attendees can test and experiment with.

The problems are:

1. The reference should be improved
2. The contribution is not enough. Please list more contribution.

Overall evaluation

0 (borderline paper)

Reviewer's confidence

4 (high)

Strengths

See comment below

Weaknesses

See comment below

Overall evaluation

The paper shows SystemX, a generic web middleware for data synchronization in browser-based applications and interactive groupware.

The demo is nice. However, the biggest issue is that there is no security aspect or study conducted since the browser to browser JS execution should be dangerous. The cross-site scripting, the same origin policy, and security measures are evolved over the years to make current web architecture secure. However, peer-to-peer javascript execution is considered dangerous without proper security implementations. Without this aspect, the proposed middleware may not be a practical solution.

Overall evaluation

1 (weak accept)

Reviewer's confidence

3 (medium)

Strengths

1. The SystemX provides continuous and interactive synchronization of online web clients. From the recorded video, the process is very smoothing.
2. The SystemX prompts resynchronization of offline clients when they come back online, and no meta-data explosion.
3. The paper is easy to follow.

Weaknesses

1. The struct of paper organization need to be reconstructed. For example, conclusion section should be added.
2. It will be more clear if authors could use a table to compare the advantage/diadvantage of the proposed tech and other related work.
3. The page and conference/journal information of some references are missing.

Overall evaluation

Thia paper proposes a generic web middleware for data synchronization in browser-based applications and interactive groupware. It offers a fine-grained data synchronization model, using state-based Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, and leverages Merkle-trees in the data model for efficient synchronization.